I am currently working on a book project on political thought in Africa with specific reference to the national security question. I am especially interested in understanding the thought systems that have shaped national security doctrines, particularly the way armed forces are organised and how they relate with citizens and civilian authority – that is, civil-military relations.
For some years, I have researched the subject of civil-military relations in Africa, part of my broader research agenda with a decent output of scholarly publications. But heretofore, I have not examined the intersection with ideas by especially African thinkers in the political realm.
The seminal starting place is to read Kwame Nkrumah, even if one must recognise the immense influence on his political thought by African diaspora intellectuals and activists of the early 20th Century – Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and CLR James, all from the Caribbean and WEB DuBois, an African American, who were among the most important pan-African thinkers.
Nkrumah led Ghana to formal independence in 1957, making the Black Star nation the first to gain sovereignty south of the Sahara. Just a decade later, he was deposed in a military coup, most certainly sponsored, if not entirely authored, by imperial forces.
Nkrumah was an intellectual giant, a philosopher king par excellence. Simultaneous with confronting the intractable problems of a new nation gripped in endemic poverty, he produced a huge corpus of intellectual work that remains of enduring relevance.
I am currently reading his African Must Unite, one of the many classical works in which he takes up a range of themes on the problems of Ghana and Africa. Published in 1963, the book is prescient and shows Nkrumah light years ahead of his time in understanding the difficulties Africa faced.
The fruits of independence were low-hanging and enticing to nationalists pushing for self-determination and freedom from the yoke of colonial rule, but Nkrumah was alert to the slow poison embedded in superficial independence.
The colonial powers acceded to granting independence without actually departing Africa or leaving Africans to go about their own business. For one, Ghana’s economy, much like the rest of the continent, remained hitched to the colonial wagon of the ‘Gold Coast’ (Ghana) as an overseas supplier of raw materials for the benefit of the empire headquartered in London. Worse, at independence the constitutional and legal regime bequeathed to the new African leaders, drafted by the colonial masters, set up African governments for disastrous failure.
There is a popular half-truth, if not altogether a subtle falsehood, that the British were benevolent colonisers who granted independence by shepherding a peaceful and democratic path forward. This received wisdom hoists independence constitutions, authored in the capitals of the colonial powers, as progressive guarantors of good governance and economic prosperity.
The full and true picture is not that straightforward. Independence constitutions and the democratic institutions they ushered in, including most recently in post-apartheid South Africa, were negotiated in ways that assured indirect control of the former colonial powers and protection of foreign economic interests along with those of local compradors.
While purporting to bring democracy to Africans who had been colonised for more than half a century without any smattering of democratic government, the independence constitutions in fact sowed seeds of instability. For example, in Ghana, the British insisted on pushing through with a popularly elected government at the centre side-by-side with regional chiefdom/kingdom authorities that both undercut the so-called democracy and created huge complications in running an efficient government.
The grand strategy appears to have been to keep new African states divided inside and across borders, feuding along ethnic lines and fighting proxy inter-state wars, thus beholden to the former colonial power, to keep crawling back to the master for solutions and paternalistic ‘guidance’.
Nkrumah saw through the perilous setup of independence political settlements and the elite pacts that served narrow power interests rather than the broader national cause of the masses. The road ahead was bound to be rough unless Africans fully secured their sovereignty and true self-government.
This was true more than 60 years ago; it’s truer today. Today’s double tragedy is the heap of problems and political classes that are nowhere near Nkrumah’s clarity of mind. In our times, global geopolitics have become fraught with many foreign competing interests, socioeconomic difficulties have deepened, and Africa continues to lag behind. Internal disharmony and continental disunity abound.
Yet, what we have at the helm of African states is a combination of rudderless rulers and ruthless military autocrats, both bereft of the sophisticated political thought of Nkrumah and his contemporaries of the 1960s.